Depression a virus?

Posted by Pegasus on June 8, 1999, at 4:08:20

Here's an interesting story that appeared on ABC news Monday night, 6/7/99.Anybody have any more info on these theories?

B E T H E S D A, Md., June 7 — There is an eternal half-light in which a depressed person seems to live. “I call it a hole in my soul,” says one such person. “You don’t see the point, when there’s no happy anymore.” Doctors have long known that depression is not just a dark mood or a deficit of character, that it’s an illness, like diabetes or high blood pressure. But just what are its roots?

Inside the Depressed Brain Until a few years ago, researchers mostly thought the problem was biochemical — a shortage, perhaps, of mood hormones such as serotonin. Today the picture is much more complex. One of the keys to depression lies on the left side of the brain, about two inches in from the forehead, in an area called the “prefrontal cortex.” The prefrontal cortex is important because it helps keep negative emotions under control. But in a depressed person, it may be as much as 40 percent smaller than in the average brain. “In people with at least some types of depression,” says Dr. Wayne Drevets of the University of Pittsburgh, “they have abnormalities not only of the function of the brain, but also of the structure of the brain.” A possible reason is that depressed patients have fewer “glia” there — the cells that supply the brain with nourishment from the bloodstream. In other words, the brain may literally be low on power when depression strikes. “It affects many, many systems in the body,” says Dr. Richard Post of the National Institutes of Mental Health. “Which goes along with the symptoms of depression that people have: trouble thinking and concentrating, changes in appetite, changes in motor activity.”

New Treatments, Better Results This growing body of knowledge is giving doctors more ways to help patients: They have better ideas about why antidepressant drugs work. They’re developing more drugs, which is important, since 20 percent of patients are not helped by the existing medicines. And at the National Institutes of Health here in Maryland, they’re working on magnetic stimulation. The right amount of magnetism may somehow restore the power the depressed brain lacks. The ammunition for battling depression is “greater, more varied and with fewer side effects,” says Post. The work is only in early stages. But it seems to prove that depression is a brain malfunction doctors can correct; that soon the half-light for many patients will begin to brighten.

Viruses on the Brain The key to a revolution in psychiatry may lie in a deep freeze at the Stanley Research Foundation in Maryland. Stored here are pieces of brain, sliced paper thin to let researchers see what’s inside. And what they believe they are seeing are viruses that trigger mental illness. “In very concrete terms, we are actually thinking that you have a chronic infection in the brain,” explains Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, executive director of the foundation. “You have viruses in the brain cells that have changed the chemistry of the cells.” For 25 years, Torrey has been on a quest to find the viruses he believes trigger schizophrenia and manic depression. The theory is simple: Common viruses can sleep harmlessly in the brain, but can awaken when we are stressed or have a drop in our immune system. When that happens, a virus can begin to inflame brain cells. Scientists are not sure why this happens, but they say some people are more genetically susceptible to the process. “When I started it,,” Torrey says, “ it seemed fairly outrageous to most of my colleagues. But I must admit, it’s almost respectable now.” So respectable that within a year a trial study will begin to add antiviral drugs to the medications for a small number of patients with schizophrenia and manic depression. “Our eventual goal,” says Dr. Robert Yolken of the Johns Hopkins Medical School, “would really be to see if we could prevent or treat these diseases — particularly schizophrenia — by using one of these anti-viral agents.” Yolken has joined Torrey to prove the theory and, if they are right, bring relief for a devastating disease.